Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 April 20

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April 20

First Worl War and Second World War having effect on colonial rule

Did both World wars destroy the British empire and French empire?
There are lots of debate over Mahtama Gandhi being branded as Father of the Nation in India.
Without the two world wars, what if British had enough money and soldiers?
Not just India, but other Asian, African countries under British, French, Belgian rule?
Would the independence have been after few decades? Imagine British and French army not suffering so many deaths.

Another thing I don't understand, why First World War has no villain like Hitler.

And always the atrocities, massacres, torture, mass rapes by Japanese army is not discussed that much. Hollywood World War movies are always on Germans, not Japanese. So Second World War must be having other Japanese ruler who was bad like Hitler. Arjun Singh 2004 (talk) 05:21, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

WW1 didn't have much effect on overseas colonies other than transferring some colonies (mainly German) to different powers, and the setting up of League of Nations mandates. (It did break up the Russian Empire in eastern Europe.) WW2 definitely had an effect -- India and Pakistan became independent a little more than two years after the end of the war. Western and Central European powers were much less dominant in world affairs in 1946 than they had been in 1913. Mahatma Gandhi adopted a rather stupid approach to World War 2, launching the Quit India Movement even though Britain simply was not going to "quit India" while fighting an epic struggle for its very national survival, and Britain was less constrained by international public opinion than at some other times. Pakistan might never even have come into existence if not for the Quit India Movement... AnonMoos (talk) 06:04, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

And the Ottoman colonies in the Middle East were appropriated by Britain and France as mandates; we're still trying to sort that one out. Alansplodge (talk) 16:41, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

P.S. Japan didn't have an evil dictator (though Americans during WW2 certainly hated both Hirohito and Hideki Tojo), but it had cliques of militarists whose policies certainly had some evil aspects by the 1930s... Empire of the Sun (film) and Bridge on the River Kwai are about the Japanese in WW2. AnonMoos (talk) 06:08, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

In an alternate history without the Quit India Movement and the 1947 Partition of India, a likely scenario is an ensuing bloody civil war following the creation of an undivided Republic of India, spurred by both the All-India Muslim League and the Pakistan Movement, only ending with the secession of Pakistan.  --Lambiam 09:38, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

• I wouldn't be so strong on the notion that the end of World War I as having no effect on the end of colonialism. Several of the Fourteen Points proposed by Woodrow Wilson at the end of the war dealt with self-determination, including points V (rights of people in having a say in their own governance), VI (keeping outside interests out of Russia during the Civil War, i.e. let Russia sort itself out), VII (condemnation of the occupation of Belgium), VIII (return of occupied French territory to France), IX (Italian borders should be drawn to include all and only Italian people), X (rights of the dismantled parts of Austria-Hungary to self-determination), XI (Rights of the Balkan nations to same), XII (rights of the dismantled Ottoman Empire to the same), XIII (rights of newly constituted Poland to same). Sadly, this emphasis was meant in practice to mean "Only white people", as there was little energy towards extending the concepts of self-determination to non-white peoples. Famously, Ho Chi Minh led a delegation representing the interests of French Indochina, to the Paris peace talks, and was summarily rebuffed. Ostensibly, it was because of their socialist leanings, but in the face of Point VI (where Wilson specifically spoke against outside action against the Bolsheviks), that seems like a hollow rationale; it's rather baldly true that there were two sets of standards for "self-determination" at the time. If your "colony" was white people who spoke a different language, give them their own country. If your "colony" was anyone else, tough shit. --Jayron32 12:33, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

The British master-plan for India was to eventually create a self-governing Indian Federation with dominion status, i.e. with a governor-general but retaining the king as head of state, like Canada and Australia. It was hoped that the federation would be dominated by conservative Hindus and the rulers of the Princely States, so that there would be no radical departure from British imperial policies. The Government of India Act 1935 was an attempt to lay the groundwork for that, but even if the war had not put an end to this scheme, it seems likely that it would have failed messily.

The British, French and Dutch empires in southeast Asia became unviable after the war, after the colonial powers had proved incapable of defending them. Alansplodge (talk) 16:58, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Something similar, I suspect, could be said of American sovereignty over the Commonwealth of the Philippines (1935-46): that the U.S. couldn't protect them, although several steps towards anticipated self-government and independence had been taken before Pearl Harbor.

On the other hand, although Britain could not protect Singapore or Malaya, she (with Australia and other countries) fought a bitter anti-Communist struggle in Malaya, ending (for Britain if not Malaya) with the formation of the independent Federation of Malaya in 1957 (united with Singapore — briefly — Sarawak and British North Borneo — Sabah — in the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. —— Shakescene (talk) 18:51, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Maybe Hollywood makes more movies about Germany than about Japan because a greater number of Hollywood actors can pass as Germans than as Japanese. —Tamfang (talk) 03:07, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

There was little concern by influential people in Hollywood about so-called "yellowface" casting before the infamous 1956 John Wayne "Conqueror" movie. However, given the U.S. view of Japanese troops in WW2, American white actors may not have been eager to play such roles. The 1960s TV show The Time Tunnel had a very melodramatic and violent episode ("Kill Two By Two") involving Japanese soldiers in WW2 (played by Asian actors)... AnonMoos (talk) 20:09, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

It certainly went later than that, Mickey Rooney's portrayal of I. Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961 received some mild criticism in its day, but it probably wasn't until the 1990s that the performance began to receive harsh criticism as overtly racist. Peter Sellers played East Asian and South Asian characters well into the 1970s to little criticism, (Soft Beds, Hard Battles, Murder by Death, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu). --Jayron32 16:13, 24 April 2023 (UTC)